Death on the Eleventh Hole
Read Death on the Eleventh Hole Online
Authors: J. M. Gregson
Copyright © J. M. Gregson 2002
The right of J. M Gregson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
First published by Severn House Publishers Ltd in 2002
This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
To
Frank
and
Yolande
Hughes
,
faithful
supporters
Kate Wharton thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her thin, short coat. It would be May tomorrow, but there was a sharpness in the evening air which reminded her that it was still only spring. There might even be a frost before the night was out.
She was on the edge of the city of Gloucester, but this part of the city was largely deserted at nine thirty as darkness dropped upon the roofs. It seemed darker and more threatening within these streets, where shuttered shops towered above her, and she longed for the movement which even a breath of wind would bring to the place. The silence and stillness oppressed her: she felt as though she was observed by a thousand mocking eyes.
The cold and the quiet made her resolution seem pointless, the course of action she proposed quite hopeless. Kate tried to thrust such negative thoughts from her mind, to assure herself of the logic of the course which she had now planned for her life. She knew that she was right, but she would have been glad at this moment of a close friend or a relative she could trust to assure her of just that.
Kate was pleased to reach the lower end of Westgate Street and pass into the older part of the city. The buildings were lower here, and she glimpsed the great bulk of the Cathedral, rising against the dark blue of early night as it had done for centuries. She thought for a moment about the medieval workmen who had raised these stones, and seen the same stars as she now saw sequinning the sky behind the tall tower. Then she turned left and back into the starkness of the present, as the Cathedral and its outbuildings disappeared abruptly from her view.
Kate Wharton was making for a public house which was in the area of the old docks. This was a tourist area now, with money spent on modernizing the old warehouses into antiques centres and museums; it was a cheerful, even a bustling place by day, with parties of schoolchildren on educational visits and holidaymakers looking for diversion in the summer. But it was silent and almost deserted now, and the only building of which Kate was conscious was the prison on her left. She was relieved when she glimpsed the lights of the pub.
She was glad to be at last among people, even people she did not know. She took a deep breath and looked at her watch as she went up to the front door of the hostelry. It was coming up to a quarter to ten.
There were not many people in the place on this Monday evening, so that Kate had no trouble in securing a table for herself as she carried her half of draught cider away from the bar. For a time, no one took any notice of the white-faced girl who sipped anxiously at her drink and kept glancing nervously towards the door. But this was not London or Manchester: a girl on her own still attracted attention in a pub. Kate Wharton had opened her coat in the warmth of the bar, and her thin cotton skirt exposed rather too much shapely leg for her own good.
‘Another of those, is it, m’dear?’ The man was perhaps thirty, with a pencil-thin moustache that he probably thought made him look racy. He spoke with the local burr of Gloucestershire or Herefordshire. He had a leather jacket, sharp brown eyes, an empty smile, and too much confidence. Kate was only just in time to snatch her glass away as he reached for it.
‘No, thanks. I’m waiting for a friend.’
He slid his jeaned buttocks on to the bench beside her. ‘Nearly ten o’clock. He’s stood you up, m’dear. Shouldn’t leave you in a place like this, a defenceless girl like you.’
She noticed that he didn’t say a nice girl or a pretty girl, the way they usually did. She didn’t like that ‘defenceless’. Kate said stiffly, ‘I’d rather be left on my own, if you don’t mind.’
‘Oh, but I do, you see. Mind, I mean. When I see a young girl on her own in a place like this, I regard it as my duty to protect her. To take charge of her, even. Let me fill that up, m’dear, and we’ll see how it goes from there, shall we?’ He let his gaze wander insolently down over her small breasts to her waist and hips, to the hem of the skirt she had pulled at automatically with his arrival, then up again to the triangle of her crotch, where he let it stay.
It was insolence without words: the action of a man who was going to have what he wanted from her, whether she delivered it willingly or not. But Kate had dealt with his sort before: you grew up quickly when you came from her background. She sat upright, looking far calmer than she actually felt. ‘Look, I’ve told you politely once that I want to be left alone. Now I’m telling you less politely. Piss off! Perhaps you’ll understand that.’
He allowed his predatory smile to develop into a short, mirthless laugh, so that the thin line of his moustache stretched above a full set of teeth, which were white but uneven. ‘Things are getting better all the time! I like a bit of spirit in my women. Bit of spunk, as you might say. I can see we’re going to get on quite well together — if you play your cards right, m’dear.’
It was the first hint of a threat, and with it the smile disappeared. Kate Wharton looked beyond him to the thinly populated pub. No one was giving any attention to this conversation in the corner. She repeated, ‘I said piss off. Now go, will you! I’m not in the mood.’
He glanced around, following her gaze to the rest of the big, low-ceilinged room, gathering as she had that no one was interested in a little spat between a couple in a corner. It was that kind of pub. And she was this kind of girl: he was confident of that. He finished his beer and gave her his charmless smile again, edging it with a touch of menace. Then he moved his fingers to caress the thigh which he had now convinced himself had been exposed to attract him. ‘You know you want it, m’ dear — you wouldn’t be here unless you did.’
At that moment, someone she could not see, round the corner of the bar, in the invisible arm of the building which had once been a separate room, called out, ‘Anyone for a game of darts? We only need one.’
Kate Wharton was on her feet in an instant, thrusting aside the clumsy arm which reached for her. ‘Here I am!’ she called, breaking into a clumsy short-stepping run, lest any other volunteer should get round the corner to the game before her.
The boys with the darts were about her own age, surprised and then pleased to see a girl coming forward to join them. ‘Your arrows, then!’ said a tousled-haired lad of about twenty. ‘You’re with me, love.’ He had a northern accent which she couldn’t place more precisely than that; she found it reassuring after the local burr of the man who had tried to force himself upon her.
She came to the oche, toed the line primly with the point of her small foot, and delivered the darts carefully at the board. She was out of practice, but she knew she was not hopeless at this game. When you had grown up as the only girl in a street filled with boys, when you had ventured into pubs long before the legal age for such pleasures, you were bound to know a little bit about darts. She was delighted to get a double and set the scoring in motion with her second dart. It was received with delighted and exaggerated acclaim by her new companions.
Thereafter, she did not score heavily, but she didn’t miss the dartboard altogether, as the lads had half-expected a woman to do. Each minor success was greeted with noisy delight by the young men around her. Her late tormentor sat at the side of the room, watching with a sardonic smile, waiting for the moment when this diversion would end and he could make his next move. With his pencil-thin moustache and his slicked-back hair, he looked like a thirties gangster on one of those old films she had watched on daytime television as a lonely child.
But Kate wasn’t worried about him. She knew that by the time this darts diversion was over, there would be another man waiting for her, the man she had come here to meet. He was late already. But he was a man who could afford to be late. He wasn’t like that pathetic package of lust who waited hopefully on the fringe of the room. The man who had arranged to meet her here was a man who really frightened her.
They were halfway through the game of darts when she saw him at the bar. Characteristically, he had arrived there without her noticing his entry. He was watching her, without troubling to disguise the fact. If he was surprised to see her playing darts with these boys, he gave no sign of it. He sat on a stool at the bar, sipping his whisky and water appreciatively and studying her movements as she threw the arrows at the board. It did not improve her performance.
Partly as a result of this, she and her cheerful partner lost the game. The boys asked her to carry on playing, said they would shuffle the sides, but she shook her head with a forced smile and moved to join the man at the bar. He acknowledged her presence with a nod, indicated with an even briefer movement of his head that they should move to the corner of the room where she had gone to await his arrival half an hour earlier. She caught sight of her late pursuer slinking out of the pub with a sour smile as she moved back to the spot where he had approached her.
Flynn didn’t offer to buy her a drink, didn’t offer even the briefest of greetings. He sat hunched within an anonymous navy anorak, with the collar turned up high enough to meet the quarter-inch stubble around his face. Only his cold grey eyes had any sign of animation, and they now fixed themselves upon a Kate Wharton who was trying to still an unexpected trembling in her limbs. Flynn sat waiting for her to speak, and she had no idea where to begin.
‘I want out!’ she said abruptly. It had come on a rush of breath, so that even the brief three monosyllables left her breathless. It was a declaration of the very nervousness she had planned to conceal.
He looked at her without expression, delaying his reply for a second or two to savour her apprehension. ‘You can’t,’ he said simply, finally.
‘I can and I must. I’m only twenty. I can build something else. I can have another kind of life. I can—’ She stopped, interrupting the list of things she had told herself when she made this decision. They didn’t seem to carry the weight here that they had held for her alone in the bedsit.
Flynn took another unhurried sip of his whisky, ran the tip of his forefinger round the edge of the glass. He had heard all this before, from other girls like this. ‘You can what? Go back on the game? Pick up where you left off as a tart?’
‘No! Well perhaps, if I need to, for a while. But that doesn’t matter to you. I’m just telling you that I’m not going to be a pusher anymore.’
‘“I’m not going to be a pusher anymore.”’ He took advantage of the fact that there was no one within ten yards of them to mimic her high, nervous tones. ‘Get real, Kate! No one walks out on us! Not me, not the blokes above me in the chain! And certainly not you!’ He allowed himself his first smile, to show his contempt for the absurd idea.
Kate mustered her remaining nerve, tried hard to thrust it into her voice as she said, ‘That’s ridiculous! I want out and I’m getting out. I never grassed in the past, and I won’t now. No one will find out anything I know. In any case, I don’t know anything worth having, anything the police might—’
‘You know about me, for a start. And that’s enough. I’m not putting my life in the hands of some little tart who doesn’t know her own mind for two minutes together. You can forget that, darling!’ His smile showed his teeth for the first time as he gave her a wolfish grin.
Kate continued desperately: ‘I’ll move away from here. No one will ever know I was even involved. You can get someone else to go round the pubs easily enough, to pass on the supplies you provide. There’s a big demand for horse and smack and ecstasy, and with the quantities of Rohypnol I’ve been shifting, there’s plenty of money in it for someone. You won’t have much difficulty—’
‘No!’ The word came like a gunshot. Flynn was a man not used to argument, not happy enough with words to want any discussion. ‘I’m telling you, not asking you, you silly little bitch! You stay with the job. God knows, it’s paying you well enough.’
Well enough for me to get out before it destroys me, thought Kate. She said, ‘I’m going. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it.’
Flynn looked at her with contempt. ‘And where are you going to get your own supplies, you silly cow, if you finish with us? These things don’t come cheap, you know. You do know, better than most.’
That was true enough. Even her ten per cent made her a handsome living. Easy money, if you didn’t mind the trade. She tried to look back into the thin, evil face with the same contempt he was showing for her. ‘I don’t need it. I’ve never needed it. Not the hard stuff. I’ve never used anything stronger than pot. Not on a regular basis.’
He made a sudden grab, seized her thin wrist, used his other hand to wrench back the sleeve of her dress, tearing the cotton a little in the process. The flesh was unmarked. A light blue vein ran upwards from the wrist until it disappeared into the white, almost translucent skin of the forearm, but there was no sign of the scratches or the puncture marks which Flynn had expected. He did not merely drop the arm: he flung it towards the floor, so that she had a taste of the strength and frustration which lay within this dangerous opponent. He was a man not used to opposition. He snarled, ‘So you don’t inject. That proves nothing, Miss Wharton!’
It was the first time Kate had ever heard him use her surname, and it was hissed with an irony which sounded an alarm in her ears. She wanted to terminate this last meeting, to be away from him, from the pub, from Gloucester itself. ‘I told you. I’ve never done more than dabble with hard drugs. I’m not a user. You can’t keep me that way.’
Flynn stared at her through narrowed eyes. Most of the pushers he recruited were users of Class A drugs, hooked on heroin or cocaine. It meant they could not cease to peddle the drugs with which he supplied them: their feeble and spasmodic attempts to get out of the trade foundered on their own dependency, on their own need for the very drugs they dealt in. He cracked the whip and they fell back hopelessly into line in return for their regular free supplies.